Daily Archives: September 25, 2009

Life’s a stage, someone said. Shakespeare, maybe, or some other writer who got immortalized. That’s what I do: I play at life. Life’s a joke. It grabs you when you rush out of your mother’s womb and lets you go only when it’s finished with you. It teases you, it prods you, it weighs on you until you want to scream. It forces you to move ahead whether you like it or not and it hard-wires the inability to do anything else than follow along. Even when you want to kill life, it has you by the throat until it decides to let go and let you fall.

Sometimes it takes forever for life to drop you off the cliff of the world. Sometimes it’s only a few short days, a few hours. There’s no rhyme or reason, no scientific data on why it happens. Some call it fate, others call it God’s will. I’m not here to judge. Just to say goodbye to life, after thirty-four years. I guess life decided I was finished. Life’s a bitch.

Rules for Fiction Friday:

Every Thursday, just check this page for this week’s theme or challenge.

Spend at least 5 minutes composing something original based on the theme or challenge.

But, remember, no editing. This is to inspire creativity not stifle it.

On Friday, simply post what you wrote to your own blog.

Then come back to Write Anything and leave the link in the comment section below.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was one of the most astonishing and riveting books I’ve read in a long time. Davidson’s research is extensive, his characters, past, present, and imaginary are fascinating, and the story is powerful. The parallels with Dante’s Inferno makes the love story between the two main characters as much a tragedy as a romance. He manages to have the reader feel pain for the narrator of the story, a totally unlovable character at the start.

It’s a story of discovery of the true self and of the purity –and intransigence– of love.

The story, as described on Goodreads:

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. Continue reading →